Whatever Happened to BeOS?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8175135

by forca • 12 years ago

15 17 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I love to tinker with operating systems -- perhaps too much. I was just thinking about BeOS and the non-Linux replacement, Haiku, which is still in Alpha 4.

What went wrong with BeOS? Was it hardware, software? No one cared because of Linux and BSD?

BeOS was original, fast, and elegant. In my opinion, it should have been the next OS X instead of the remnants of Next.

dsr_• 12 years ago

When BeOS was becoming interesting, it was competing against MacOS 8 and Linux (assuming you had already ruled out Windows and you couldn't/wouldn't pay for a UNIX workstation).

MacOS had commercial apps and a good reputation in certain fields. The hardware was expensive by PC standards but high quality.

Linux was growing like a weed: adding just a little more RAM to the kind of desktop a college student could afford let you do everything that the Sun workstations in the computer lab could do, and you never had to share it.

If BeOS had been free, compatible with less-blessed hardware, and not offended Apple so much, it might have had a chance.

dottrap4• 12 years ago

For Apple, BeOS would have been a disastrous choice and NeXT knew this. BeOS and its public APIs were built on C++ which is terrible for binary (ABI) compatibility, which is a critical feature to convince 3rd party commercial (proprietary) developers to develop for your platform.

You can see that BeOS and later Haiku were stuck on an ancient version of gcc 2 because they could never upgrade without breaking all existing binary compatibility.

After NeXT did their not-so-secret reverse takeover of Apple, you can see they solved the binary compatibility problem for the most part by leveraging both C and Objective-C which both had a predictable/stable ABI, even with all the tinkering they did to extend the languages and eventually replace the compilers (Codewarrior->gcc->clang).

peatmoss3• 12 years ago

I've heard this story relayed in person in nearly identical language before. Do I know you? Either that or this was more in the zeitgeist than I think.

0x0• 12 years ago

My bet: a lack of a killer app, plus no compatibility with killer apps on other platforms.

OS/2 was slightly more compatible with existing apps and therefore had slightly more success for a while.

morganvachon2• 12 years ago

That was a thorn in the side of many a BeOS user; while GoBe Productive was an amazing office suite, Microsoft Office had a stranglehold and if you didn't have Word and Excel, you didn't have a computer in many people's minds.

The world has changed in the past 13 years; we've had OpenOffice and LibreOffice for many years, and Google Docs/Drive has forced Microsoft to focus on cloud-based productivity apps. Back when BeOS was alive, it was just as common to have a dial up modem as it was DSL or cable, and sometimes broadband simply wasn't available in certain areas. Cloud computing as we know it now was still over the horizon.

In today's cloud-centric Internet, Haiku could easily thrive if it got enough momentum. Unfortunately the only people who seem to even know about it are old BeOS hats like myself.

morganvachon2• 12 years ago

I was a heavy BeOS user during its last days, and from what I remember, Microsoft put some serious pressure on certain OEMs to not sell BeOS on their computers. Compaq was one of those; they were told in no uncertain terms that if Compaq sold even one computer with BeOS on it, they'd never sell another computer with Windows, period.

That's certainly not the only reason the company went under, but it was a major factor.

wmf• 12 years ago

Partly they just didn't have enough money to build an OS, so every time they pivoted it put them further behind. And they pivoted a lot of times.

I think they made a lot of design decisions that were overfitted for 1995, so if they had survived they would have quite a bit of legacy cruft by now. And the brittleness of C++ may have made the cruft worse.

In some cases their idealism seems to have held back practical adoption. Their "pervasive multithreading" made it very difficult to port Java and Mozilla. (The idea of "only native apps, no ports" made perfect sense in the siloed PC market of 1993. By 1997, not so much.) Treating all developers equally meant that professional developers may have gotten shortchanged.

api• 12 years ago

I think the problem was the same as that faced by languages like D competing with C++11:

It wasn't "better enough" than the alternatives.

It was better than NeXT (what would become OSX), but not enough to be revolutionary. It was better than Windows, Mac Classic, and Linux, but also not enough to be revolutionary.

The existing closed incumbents won out by market share and inertia, and Linux won out by being free, open, and by basically going viral.

If BeOS had been open and free I think it would have given Linux a run for its money, but it wasn't.

CyberFonic• 12 years ago

Like most companies of that era, they built their own hardware (BeBox) which was very expensive (compared to the PCs of the time). Later they moved to Apple hardware and Apple did try to buy them but they held out for more money.

Linux took hold because you could pull any old PC out of the junk pile and load it up and go. BSD, at the time, was fracturing into multiple versions and having legal troubles.

Haiku alpha 4 is awesome. But there are too many other projects out there so there aren't enough resources to make faster progress.

The wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS has a lot of more good information.

Whatever Happened to BeOS?

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